As you probably already know, our self-service publisher program, the Yahoo! Publisher Network Online (YPNO) was closed effective April 30, 2010.

Accordingly, the YPN blog—this blog—will be shut down in about a week.

The most pertinent content over the last four years has already been shifted to the Yahoo! Advertising blog. You can find it under the Publisher tab. After we shut the YPN blog down the YPNblog.com URL will automatically redirect to the Yahoo! Advertising blog,

Since our very first post, the YPN blog’s authors and editors have strived to serve the interests not just of Yahoo! Publisher Network partners but publishers everywhere, with helpful tips and tricks on how you can be better and more profitable at what you do. And we will continue to serve your interests on the Yahoo! Advertising blog. (And let’s face it, the line between publishers and advertisers is disappearing, so it makes sense to treat both in a single space.)

After the YPN blog is closed down and the URL redirected to the Yahoo! Advertising blog, publishers wanting look back at our content will be able to do so from a link on the Yahoo! Advertising blog Publisher page.

To all of our publishers and partners, past and present, we wish peace, love and sock monkeys!

— The Team

As we shared in February, Yahoo! and Microsoft have formed a search alliance that we believe will help provide more rapid innovation and better monetization to our partners. Innovating search and search advertising is essential to Yahoo!’s strategy and will help deliver more value to partners like you.

Over the last several months, we’ve been working closely with Microsoft to develop a high-quality transition experience for our partners. While there’s nothing you need to do at this time, we did want to let you know that your Yahoo! account manager will be in touch in the coming weeks to provide you with a detailed overview and to answer any questions that you may have.

Transition timing
Our priority is to make this transition as seamless as possible for you. We know how important the holiday selling season is to both our advertisers and partners. That’s why our aim is to complete the transition in the U.S. and Canada before the start of the 2010 holiday season.

Next steps and resources
Please note there are several resources to help you stay up to date on the transition:

Transition Center – The Yahoo! Transition Center includes articles, downloadable materials.
YPN Blog – The Yahoo! Publisher Network blog will post regularly about the transition.
Updates – We’ll send you updates via email, and your account managers will reach out to you directly, so you won’t miss a thing.

We are committed to making this transition as seamless and beneficial for you as possible. We appreciate your business, and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

— The Team

PayPal option available to publishers

It’s a weird concept, money. Money used to take the form of tokens of stored value, usually made of stuff that people prized: rare shells or stones, or metals like gold, silver, copper and even iron. Later, it became more convenient to carry a kind of value voucher—made of clay, papyrus, paper, what have you—that wasn’t as heavy as gold or shells.

Today’s currency is about as light as you can get. It’s little more than an idea of value represented by some data that can be shunted from one database to another in the blink of an eye.

So it is with PayPal, which, we wanted to remind you, is now a payment option for publishers in our network. There are a number of bennies to using PayPal:

• Payment requires a minimum balance of just $50, as opposed to $100 for checks
• Same-day payment—whereas check payments are made seven to ten days after we receive the request (payments will still be issued on pre-determined days)
• No-fee transfers to your PayPal account, so you don’t pay more for the convenience

To add PayPal to your account, go to the “Payment Options” page under the Account Information tab, check the PayPal radio button, and click “Submit.”

—The Team

Before we get started, let’s do “full disclosure.” A long, long time ago, back when the Web was just a toddler and I was a shave-tail assistant editor at a new magazine called Business 2.0, there was any number of Internet funny-money schemes out there, all trying to get covered in the press.

I ignored most of them.

Then the boys from PayPal rang up. I knew right away that PayPal was something different, but I was still skeptical. So instead of a feature story, I wrote a little blurb for the front of the magazine. PayPal, of course, has become one of the Web’s great success stories. In fact, I use it all the time.

PayPal for Our Publisher Pals
Today at Yahoo! Publisher Network we’re pleased, and I mean pleased, to announce that publishers in our network now have the option to be paid via PayPal, rather than by check or by electronic funds transfer.

In addition to the greater flexibility and convenience offered by PayPal, publishers who opt in will enjoy a reduced payment threshold, from $100 to just $50.

For more information, please read our FAQs. To sign up for PayPal, log in to your account.

Not only should I have written that PayPal feature story, I should have invested. Ouch.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Just a Little Nip/Tuck Here and There

Burbank, California, where our offices are located, is a funny sort of place. It’s kind of like Hollywood’s workshop. Most of the glory goes to the actors and directors, but the real nuts-and-bolts work goes on behind the camera. It’s not uncommon around here to pass a flatbed truck piled high with giant Styrofoam rocks on its way some film location, or come across shops that rent costumes and even medieval armor and weapons to film production teams.

Here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, a lot goes on behind the user interface. Take last night’s scheduled outtage. We made lots of little tweaks that you probably won’t notice, the sort of stuff that will make it easier for us to manage the system and offer better service to our publishers.

But there are a couple of small items you may appreciate, especially if you take advantage of our extensive Publisher Services. We’ve updated our info on Yahoo! Site Explorer, the service that allows you to track links to your site(s). We’ve also added info on MyBlogLog, a useful traffic-driving and analytical service that has recently come into the Yahoo! family. In addition, we’ve updated the Yahoo! Action Buttons page.

If you haven’t explored these services before, you’ll definitely want to check them out now (or maybe have your Best Boy or Key Grip check them out for you), because they can be valuable resources in helping you create your own productions.

• Drive Traffic
• Enhance Your Site
• Build Your Site 

—Michael Mattis, Blog Director

The term “quality” can be quite subjective until it is related to something very specific. It may take a tailor to tell the difference between good-quality stitching and high-quality stitching. Likewise, it might take an oenophile or even a sommelier to tell the difference between a good claret and a really great one.

As a publisher using contextual advertising networks, you know when you’re displaying quality ads—ads that are contextual to your content and appealing to your users (i.e., ads that are highly clickable). Advertisers, too, know quality. They see it as highly qualified clicks by users likely to become customers.

And the users? They know a little about quality, as well. They know what they want: content, products and services that meet their needs, wrapped into an engaging, trusted experience. That’s why Yahoo! is committed to encouraging quality all across our network, for everyone.

In fact, Yahoo!’s click-through protection system proactively identifies and does not bill advertisers for between 12 and 15 percent of clicks on average. This includes not only click fraud, but also other types of clicks that Yahoo! believes should not be billed to advertisers.

We’re Panamaniacs
As you no doubt know from the blogosphere buzz, Yahoo! Search Marketing recently launched its new search advertising system, sometimes called “Project Panama.” This new system gives advertisers considerably more visibility into their ads’ quality and more control than before. As new “Project Panama” features roll out, advertisers will be provided with even more visibility and control. One of the new features is quality-based pricing, which will help ensure that traffic is priced consistently with the quality it delivers.

But we also haven’t forgotten our publishers. Over the coming weeks and months, as these features come online, we’ll be offering helpful hints and tips on the blog that will better enable you to work with the system’s new capabilities.

A Man, a Plan…
Lastly, we’re pleased to announce the appointment of a new vice president of Marketplace Quality. The new VP, Reggie Davis, will be 100 percent dedicated to ensuring quality for all of Yahoo’s advertisers, publishers and end users. Reggie will drive all of our quality efforts, hiring a dedicated staff that will coordinate quality teams across the organization.

Welcome aboard, Reggie.

Learn more about our efforts to build a quality network and how you, the publisher, fit in:
Quality Standards
Getting Better All the Time
Tips from YahooSarah
And Another Thing
Maintaining a Quality Network

—Michael Mattis, Quality Blog Editor

This expression has become common in our pop culture. It refers to something that you may not be into but, if others like it, that’s OK by you. It’s a “different strokes for different folks” kind of world.

We try to reflect that same sense of choice at the Yahoo! Publisher Network. We match our ads to your site’s content as best we can, but we don’t expect you to display ads that you think your users won’t want, or ads for businesses that compete with yours. Thus, we developed Ad Blocking, a feature that we recently updated.

As suggested by its name, Ad Blocking allows you to block ads from a given domain or multiple domains that you don’t want to appear on your site. To activate Ad Blocking, just click on the “Ad Setup” tab in the secure account interface and hit the “Ad Blocking” tab. You can block up to 200 domains.

There are two levels of Ad Blocking:

Domain-Level Blocking: Entering, say, “mycompetitor.com” will block ads pointing to the entire mycompetitor.com domain. This is the broadest form of blocking. Note that in order to do this, you must enter the domain URL without the “www” domain prefix.

 

Sub-Domain Level Blocking: Entering “products.mycompetitor.com” will block ads pointing to only the products.mycompetitor.com sub-domain. Ads pointing to www.mycompetitor.com (with the “www” prefix) or a different sub-domain, such as “people.mycompetitor.com,” will not be blocked.

For more info on Ad Blocking, see our FAQ’s.

—The Team

Building a high-quality network is a top priority at Yahoo! Publisher Network. We’ve offered a plethora of blog posts to help you, the publisher, understand just what that means (like this one, this one, and this one). Ensuring compliance with terms and conditions, especially with regard to ad implementation and content, is a big part how we maintain that quality

With that in mind, we’re happy to unveil a new feature called Compliance Manager. This feature helps you pinpoint problems with the implementation of your Yahoo! ads, or problems with content on the same page as your Yahoo! ads, so that you can correct them—and keep the ads flowing. 

Here’s how it works: If a compliance issue is detected on one of your URLs, you will be notified via email and through an alert in your secure account interface. These will direct you to your new Compliance Manager control panel. The Compliance Manager will inform you of what the issue is so that you have the opportunity to fix it. Once you’ve addressed the issue, you can then go back to the Compliance Manager to submit the remedied URL. We’ll get back to you with a status report, usually within seven business days. 

—Eric Edge, Yahoo! Publisher Network Product Manager

Yahoo! offers a cornucopia of publisher-related services and content, from domains and hosting services to content badges and APIs for you to mash up in original ways. Now we’ve put them in one place, accessible to you whether you are in the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta program or not.

At the new Yahoo! Publisher Network home page you’ll find all you need to help:

• Drive traffic—Syndication, feed submission, pod- and video-casting, and search marketing tools and products
• Enhance your site—Yahoo! content, including easy-to-implement search tools, badges, APIs and Creative Commons open content
• Build a new site or re-establish an existing one—Domain registration, custom email, web hosting and design, and online merchant solutions

In addition, the new home page includes headline feeds directly from the blog, and a sleek new look.

It’s all on the new Yahoo! Publisher Network home page. Check it out »

—The Team

We’ve been doing some tinkering under the bonnet recently, so some of you may notice a few changes in your ads. The changes you’re likely to see include the removal of ellipses (…) and truncated words, the inclusion of 40-character titles on certain ad units, and a change in the number of ads displayed on certain ad layouts.

These enhancements have to do with our efforts to upgrade our contextual advertising product, and in the coming weeks will take effect across the entire network. They come in response to your feedback and should, in the long run, help enhance your account performance. We’ll share more details with you as they become available.
 

—Tom Furukawa, Director, Product Management